My first case of plagiarism….

Actually my second because some douche from Dartmouth stole the exact format of my Tucker Max article. (Compare the two here and here)

Anyways, this guy (who I won’t link to here, but I’ll show you if you email) took myFight Club Moments post and tried to pass it off as his own. He even changed the part about Rudius Media to “As I learned from my time in the Navy…” And then later he topped the whole thing off by stealing a post from Robert Greene and then another one from me.

Of course I want to freak out and get pissed, but aside from emailing him, I don’t think I will. Although I can’t come close to grasping the lack of self-respect it takes claim another’s work as your own. I mean, cheating on a test is one thing, but to pretend, with little incentive, to own credit on a creative work you had nothing to do with is low and lame.

Here’s the advice I got from Tucker last time and if I was smart enough to come up with something better, I would.

“Dude, welcome to the creative arts. This is life. Plagiarism happens, and you aren’t a big enough or good enough writer yet to have enough weight to stop it on your end. Life isn’t alway fair Just keep writing good stuff and get big enough that next time, you do.”

Related: If you’re dealing with plagiarism, this is a good site to help guide you through legal action.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.

5 Comments

The same thing happened to me a little while back, but I got a little bit more pissed about it. Looking back, your course of action is much more reasonable and mature than my blatant overreaction. Have you had any reply from your emails to the idiot in question?

That’s pretty shitty, especially because yours had legitimate business issues at stake. And believe me, getting pissed is what I did last time, so much so that Tucker’s first response was to laugh at me and say “young people are funny.”

Anyways, yeah I just heard back from the guy, I’ll post it later today. I’m not sure if I buy it.

Kilo
May 20, 2007 at 5:05 pm

Post it. Better to be open about such things if you have nothing to hide. Only thing you owe him (maybe) is to redact the email address.